This story appears in the March 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs Does anyone have a plan for what happens next? In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. They were operating at speeds that the human body--an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes--simply wasn't built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there's a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things. Still, the machines pressed on. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. So Massachusetts created the nation's first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call "negative externalities" but were then called "children's arms torn off," policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories--leading indicators that things in your society aren't going great--Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Measurement doesn't abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting--of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts--signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. It's one way a republic earns the right to be believed in. The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization.

He catches nascent changes in the political weather. "During early, he kept telling me, 'Crime--there's something here,' " DeBoo told me. DeBoo studied the latest crime statistics and saw nothing unusual. He brushed off the worry. Then new numbers came out, showing a large pandemic spike in shoplifting and car theft, and concerns about crime exploded into the headlines. Last March, judging the winds, Newsom launched a podcast, "This Is Gavin Newsom."

Influence maximization in social networks plays a vital role in applications such as viral marketing, epidemiology, product recommendation, opinion mining, and counter-terrorism. A common approach identifies seed nodes by first detecting disjoint communities and subsequently selecting representative nodes from these communities. However, whether the quality of detected communities consistently affects the spread of influence under the Independent Cascade model remains unclear. This paper addresses this question by extending a previously proposed disjoint community detection method, termed $α$-Hierarchical Clustering, to the influence maximization problem under the Independent Cascade model. The proposed method is compared with an alternative approach that employs the same seed selection criteria but relies on communities of lower quality obtained through standard Hierarchical Clustering. The former is referred to as Hierarchical Clustering-based Influence Maximization, while the latter, which leverages higher-quality community structures to guide seed selection, is termed $α$-Hierarchical Clustering-based Influence Maximization. Extensive experiments are performed on multiple real-world datasets to assess the effectiveness of both methods. The results demonstrate that higher-quality community structures substantially improve information diffusion under the Independent Cascade model, particularly when the propagation probability is low. These findings underscore the critical importance of community quality in guiding effective seed selection for influence maximization in complex networks.

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The growing ubiquity of conversational AI highlights the need for frameworks that capture not only users' instrumental goals but also the situated, adaptive, and social practices through which they achieve them. Existing taxonomies of conversational behavior either overgeneralize, remain domain-specific, or reduce interactions to narrow dialogue functions. To address this gap, we introduce the Taxonomy of User Needs and Actions (TUNA), an empirically grounded framework developed through iterative qualitative analysis of 1193 human-AI conversations, supplemented by theoretical review and validation across diverse contexts. TUNA organizes user actions into a three-level hierarchy encompassing behaviors associated with information seeking, synthesis, procedural guidance, content creation, social interaction, and meta-conversation. By centering user agency and appropriation practices, TUNA enables multi-scale evaluation, supports policy harmonization across products, and provides a backbone for layering domain-specific taxonomies. This work contributes a systematic vocabulary for describing AI use, advancing both scholarly understanding and practical design of safer, more responsive, and more accountable conversational systems.

BBC Verify has been to the house in Washington, Utah which has been linked to Tyler Robinson - the suspect in the killing of Charlie Kirk. Sitting in the driveway was a grey car, similar to the model detectives said the suspect had driven to Utah Valley University where Kirk was fatally shot. BBC Verify's Nick Beake has been searching for answers at the location and on social media. Angola: The notorious prison being used in Trump's immigration crackdown The new detention facility inside the prison is designed to hold more than 400 undocumented immigrants convicted of serious crimes. Jackson Denio, a 13-year-old from New Hampshire, might have set the world record for the largest catch of a halibut fish.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox announced Thursday that a suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk was in police custody. Cox said investigators reviewed video footage and identified Tyler Robinson, 22, arriving in a Dodge Challenger vehicle at approximately 08:29 local time on 10 September. When encountered in person by investigators on 12 September, he was observed in clothing consistent to that in previously released footage, including a plain maroon t-shirt, light-coloured shorts, a black hat with a white logo and light-coloured shoes. Can Trump send National Guard troops to Chicago? Trump has said we're going in, when asked about sending National Guard troops to Chicago, but does he have the power to do this?

The FBI has released new footage showing the suspect in the killing of US activist Charlie Kirk running across a roof - from where the fatal shot was fired - before dropping to the ground and crossing a road. As the authorities continue their search, BBC Verify's Nick Beake has been looking at the footage and what we know about his escape. Watch: Key moments from RFK Jr's heated Senate hearing The US health secretary faced questions on Covid deaths and vaccines a week after firing the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The group said they are making their own list of Jeffrey Epstein's associates and called for the release of all files related to the investigation. The molten magma streamed down one of the world's most active volcanoes and put on another fiery show on the Island of Hawaii.

Utah authorities have released CCTV footage showing the Charlie Kirk shooting suspect fleeing the scene at Utah Valley University. The video shows a figure dressed in black running across a roof before dropping down to the ground and fleeing towards a wooded area. Authorities say the suspect was wearing Converse shoes, sunglasses and a distinctive black T-shirt with an American flag and an eagle. Watch: Key moments from RFK Jr's heated Senate hearing The US health secretary faced questions on Covid deaths and vaccines a week after firing the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The group said they are making their own list of Jeffrey Epstein's associates and called for the release of all files related to the investigation.

Hundreds of people had gathered to hear right-wing activist Charlie Kirk speak at the Utah Valley University on Wednesday. The conservative activist and influential Trump ally was shot and killed while speaking. BBC Verify has been piecing together a timeline of how the incident unfolded. 'I would feel more worried' - Chicagoans on Trump's plan to deploy troops President Donald Trump says he will send the National Guard to Chicago to help fight crime but has not specified when that could occur. Officers in Michigan were responding to reports of a stolen vehicle, when they deployed a grappler device around one of the car's tires.